Four Months of Project Vessel Blog

Welcome back! This is a filler post but I will try to make it as interesting as I can. Today I want to make a quick production update on Vessel status, after that I want to share my experience during these 4 months and some of the blog numbers. Spoiler it has been a ride!

Vessel status update

To sum it up, we’ve been cooking! We missed the original prototype target date due to some life complications (I will talk about them later in this post), but we are aiming to have the prototype built this week with the block out of the demo level, the main enemy, and character control in place. Then we are aiming to have an alpha that will show the first playable of the demo for this March 19th. Just in time to present us to the Epic Megagrants, expect more news regarding this soon!

Vessel blog experience

I’m not going to lie, keeping the blog up to date has been challenging to say the least. Most of the weeks I feel like I have two jobs regarding Vessel and sometimes I need to choose between keeping the blog alive or jumping into the project. I think this will be easier to deal with once I start getting more traction and stability. 

During these 4 months I moved to another home, started a new job as a contractor, started the accreditation process for being an Unreal Engine accredited instructor, and essentially being busy trying to survive. Behind every dream and project there’s just people, and the smaller the team the more important is every person in it. 

Does it pay the effort? To me the short answer is yes. The long one is there will be few things that I will drop to make this more sustainable:

• Initially there was a big push for having the blog translated into Spanish. At the moment in terms of views the proportion is 20 views in English for each Spanish reader. Maybe in a world where I get read by millions of people it might pay off to translate it but right now I'm doubling my efforts for essentially a couple of Spanish readers.

• Publishing on Fridays is killing the blog traffic. I mostly get new people viewing this blog through LinkedIn and while the traction is quite good when I publish during the week it looks like doing it on Friday halves the views of a post.

• I have around 30 very recurring visitors! At the time I think I could spot all of you by the name but it make me really grateful and happy seeing you there each week.

In conclusion, I’ll be dropping the Spanish posts starting from today and try to consistently publish either Tuesdays or Wednesdays. I can’t wait to share some of the work we have been doing next week! I’m still doubting the format though, how would you approach this? Let me know in the comments! Have a great weekend!